Saturday, October 11, 2014

Window on Eurasia: Including the Crimean Tatars in Russia ‘Changes Russia’s Linguistic Map’ More than Moscow Plans, Daghestani Says

Paul
Goble

Staunton, October 11 – Vladimir Putin’s
Anschluss of Crimea has had many unintended consequences but one that may
ultimately prove to be especially important is the way in which the illegal
inclusion of the Crimean Tatars inside the Russian Federation has affected that
country’s “linguistic map,” something likely to have political consequences as
well.

In a commentary on LiveJournal,
Daghestani writer Ruslan Salahbekov points out that the language which the Crimean
Tatars speak is not their alone: it is spoken by other groups as well, and collectively,
they number 1.2 million people and make up the sixth largest language community
in that country (salahbekov.livejournal.com/1095824.html).

The peoples who are part of this
community do not have a common ethnicity, he points out, but their common
language not only will promote the sharing of ideas among them but also mean
that Moscow will have to take into greater account a language that will join
Russian, Tatar, Bashkir, Chuvash, Chechen and Armenian as a “millionaire”
language.

(There are several million Ukrainian
speakers in the Russian Federation, Salahbekov points out, but most of them
speak Russian as well and have been counted as Russians in the census.
Consequently, they do not figure in this ranking, although he suggests they
should by rights be in it.)

The language group of which the
250,000 Crimean Tatars are a member, Salahbekov continues, includes “more than
500,000 Kumyks, almost 220,000 Karachays, about 115,000 Balkars and more than
100,000 Nogays,” for a total of “approximately 1.2 million” speakers in all
from Crimea in the West to Daghestan in the east.

“This language does not have a
single name,” he acknowledges; instead, it has four, depending on who is using
it. “But it is one language,” and those who speak one are often closer in their
linguistic practice to members of the other three than they are to subgroups
within their own, and collectively, they are far more similar than to other
Turkic tongues.

“The lack of a single name for a
language does not mean that there is not a single language,” as numerous
examples from the Caucasus and beyond show, Salahbekov continues.In the Caucasus, there are the various
Circassian peoples who speak a common language even though they have been
subdivided into individual groups.

And in the Balkans, there is the
noted case of the Serbs, Croatians and Bosnians, who though different
ethnically and politically nonetheless speak a common language.There, it is a case of “three ethnoses and
one language.” With the Crimean Tatar group, it is one of “five ethnoses and
one language.”

As appreciation of this reality
spreads to the five, he suggests, they will find themselves ever more closely
linked, something that will promote the spread of ideas among them and quite
possibly destabilize further the already complicated ethnic scene in the North
Caucasus, hardly Moscow’s intention when it occupied Crimea.